​ I have not yet explained why I chose to call this podcast Aesthetic Greatness. In all honesty, it is a pretty snarky title. I chose Aesthetic Greatness because of this quote by renowned art critic Brian Sewell:

There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50% or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children (Gunter).

I wanted to turn this idea on its head. Not only am I, as a woman, capable of aesthetic greatness in my art, but also I am capable of creating Aesthetic Greatness the podcast full of episodes that prove this quote wrong. As it turns out, this is not the only quote, man, or even woman that I need to disprove. There are very, very many. This episode is dedicated to those who became true examples of sexist art critics.
There are, even today, few exceptions to the rule that art critics think lesser of women artists and their work. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the sexism in art criticism was even more blatant. Stereotypes about women permeated past a woman’s social life and into the reception of her work. Multiple male critics claimed during this era that women were simply not creative or original (Nemser 74). C.J. Bulliet, an art critic from the 1920s, went so far as to say this about artist Mary Cassatt: “like the vast majority of women artists…Miss Cassatt preferred to be a lesser man” (Mitchell 681). People also thought that women were not serious enough about art (Nemser 77). Critics stripped women’s art of all intellectualism, as seen in Paul Rosenfeld’s comment about Georgia O’Keefe’s work having “no traces of intellectualization” (Mitchell 682). It is evident that ideas about a woman’s place in society affected the criticism of women’s work. If a woman stepped outside of the home to pursue something that was stereotypically male, like art was, then she was obviously trying to be like a man. If she was trying to be a man, she could clearly only ever be mediocre, because she was, in fact, a woman. Unfortunately, when critics would attempt to speak positively about female artists, the fact that she was a woman only made reviews painfully typecast.
Knowing that an artist was a woman would often cause 19th and 20th century critics to attribute many of the elements of a piece to an inherent femininity. Characteristics such as passivity, emotionality, and sensitivity were attributed to women’s work whether they were accurate descriptors or not (Nemser 76). A great example of this is the undying trend of associating all of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers with female genitalia. For decades, art critics saw O’Keefe’s flowers and immediately associated them with her womanhood. O’Keefe “repeatedly rejected [this] Freudian interpretation” of her flowers. She actually associated her flowers more with skyscrapers than with vaginas. She made the flowers “big like the huge buildings going up” so people would notice them and she would become more well known (Mitchell 684). Flowers were not the only subjects considered to be feminine. “Sunday picnics, playing children, and women preparing to look their best” was how critic John Baur boiled down Berthe Morisot’s subject matter, which was, according to him, obviously drawn from her own femininity (Nemser 76). To me, this assertion is just silly. Sunday picnics and women at their vanities were common subjects for men as well – take for example the work of Morisot’s contemporaries, such as Edouard Manet’s 1863 painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe or Degas’s 1905 painting Woman at Her Toilette (“Edoard Manet Luncheon on the Grass,” “Woman at Her Toilette”). Yet, when painted by a woman, these subjects were chosen because of her femininity, not because they were good and popular subjects.
Now my question is this: How do we change these old perceptions of female artists that linger still today? The answer is not a simple one, but it starts with the very first episode of Aesthetic Greatness. It starts with art education. To change the way we talk about women’s art, we need to educate people with the vocabulary to do so. If we teach art history equally, regardless of the gender of the artist, our art criticism will become more equal. It is also extremely important to educate people about why they see so few examples of historically successful female artists. The more society understands the difficulties that female artists had to face, the less likely they are to confuse women’s inequality in the art world with the false notion of women’s inferior talent for art. We do not need any more people like Georg Baselitz, an artist who blatantly said that “women don’t paint very well” and tried to justify his claim by saying “the market doesn’t lie” (Miller).
In summary, art critics in history had problems with women artists, and some of the ideas they had about the mediocrity of women artists are still present today. To rid the art world of this prejudice, we have to start with an art education curriculum that presents not only the art of all genders in equal light, but also discusses the difficulties artists who were not white men faced. We cannot just explain why critics like Brian Sewell and artists like Georg Baselitz are wrong about women artists. We have to make sure that sexist individuals like them do not exist in the art world in the first place. To end this episode, I will leave you with a quote from Cindy Nemser’s 1973 work, “Art Criticism and Women Artists:”

My intention is to uncover these stereotypes and to bring them into the open. Perhaps when exposed to the clear light of reason, they will be laughed out of existence. Then we can begin anew to judge women’s art (73).